TechBlog

Firefox is the most popular open source web browser. The latest release is version 3.6. It is available in more than 70 languages for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

Features that made Firefox popular
Some of the new features in the latest version include: personas, or themes that help users to personalize the appearance of Firefox; a plug-in updater that will detect out-of-date plug-ins; stability improvements and performance tuning. Now, we will see some features that made the user prefer Firefox over other browsers.

Fine Tunings in Tabbed browsing
Firefox supports tabbed browsing. This allows users to open multiple pages in the same window. There has been lot of fine tuning in this feature. You can rearrange your tags by dragging them. When you open a new tab in Firefox 3.5, the existing ones slide to the left. Firefox also permits multiple homepages. It may be your current pages, or a group of Bookmarks. They are automatically opened in separate tabs. You can drag a tab into a new Firefox window by dragging it to the desktop—or drag a window back into the open browser to make it a tab. Firefox offer a blank white page on new tabs. If you have multiple tabs opened and you are attempting to close the browser, it will ask whether you want to save the open tabs for your next session or just quit. If you save them, you will get all your tabs and sites when you reopen Firefox next time. Firefox had an “Open recently closed tabs” and reopen recently closed windows option. So even if you’ve closed a tab or a whole browser window unintentionally you won’t lose them.

Awesome Bar
One of the special features of Firefox is the address bar. The address bar is officially called the location bar. When you start typing in it, it suggests a list of Web destinations based on your browsing history. The search bar is resizable now. You can divide the space between the location and search bars to your taste.

There is a star in the right side of the Location bar. It gives you a simple way to mark a page as a favorite, the difference between starring and bookmarking is this. Firefox’s star saves the page as a bookmark. That means the page doesn’t show up in the top-menu Bookmarks item, but it does show up in Recently Bookmarked.

Download manager
The download manager in the Firefox has the ability to pause and resume downloads and you can search the previous downloads. Once the Download is completed it is automatically scanned for viruses. You can change the default location where downloads are saved.

Some more features of firefox on later posts. Stay close.